Hurricane!

Nicole became a hurricane before it made landfall just north of us in Vero Beach early Thursday morning. Some of our neighbors said that the eye went right over our heads in the Jensen Beach/Port St. Lucie area. I can't attest to that because we slept through it, thanks to Barb and Barry, where we spent the day and night in their wonderfully quiet and secure concrete block house. We had a great time binge watching new episodes of Seal Team, between eating 😉 and updates on the weather channel (so much beach erosion, especially in places north, like Daytona where some buildings were falling into the water and others condemned). We never lost power, which was good too. In the morning the sun came out and we helped take down their storm shutters and pick up some of the tree branches that fell down. Then it was back to our place to take down our shutters and there were only a few small branches to deal with. As we drove into the park, amazingly everything looked like there had been no storm at all! Here we are all tied down and shuttered up, including the doors:

The wind had been howling from the northeast for days before the storm arrived and with the full moon, there were king high tides flooding roadways along with gigantic waves from the storm. This is a snapshot of the entrance to the House of Refuge beach on Hutchinson Island. That is such a narrow piece of land that the ocean flooded right to the Indian River.

After we bid good luck to our mobile home and headed to Barb and Barry's house on Wednesday, we stopped to see how high the water was along the western shore of the Indian River in Riverside Park. This is definitely not a normal occurrence and eventually the sidewalk broke up with the pounding waves.

The water was already up to the building at the US Sailing Center as members scrambled to move and secure boats and dinghies to higher ground in the parking lot.

Everywhere, the winds were pushing the tides even higher causing stationary docks to be underwater. As the conditions deteriorated even more, someone posted these photos on Facebook of the waves breaking under the Jensen Beach Causeway. The north side boat launch ramp docks were destroyed, and someone abandoned a derelict power boat on the seawall, which broke apart (not to mention that a lot of the paved parking lot is filled with piles of gravel and rocks that washed in. 

There is lots of clean up to be done around the county, but the workers are already on it. We definitely lucked out this time with this unusual late season hurricane. Now things are getting back to normal, and we are anxious to get our kayaks out on the water and over to Peck Lake, with its ocean beach, to see what kind of treasures have washed ashore. Who knows, we could find something really rare from an historical shipwreck that Nicole may have uncovered. This is the Treasure Coast after all. You know that if we do, you will see it here on the blog!